E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in His Adventure on Earth

by William Kotzwinkle

  “We’re sick . . .” Elliott raised his hand. “. . . we’re dying . . .”

  The water was running over them, over Elliott and this monstrous shape, this tower of nightmares three feet tall. From the tower came a signal. The creature’s lips were moving, and Mary heard split echoes, shattering cavernous spaces. “. . . will . . . ow . . . crea . . . ture . . .”

  “He’s from the moon,” said Gertie.

  Mary grabbed Elliott and dragged him from the shower. She could think only of escape, from whatever it was that had held Elliott a moment ago, a wet reptilian thing, too monstrous to contemplate further. “Downstairs, all of you,” she said, wrapping Elliott in a towel and pushing them all ahead of her. Her mind wasn’t working rationally; she was running on some kind of twilight sense, groping blindly. The thing in the bathtub could stay there; she was getting out, with the kids. Beyond that, she had no other ideas or interests.

  “We can’t leave him alone,” protested Elliott.

  Mary just pushed forward. She had Absolute Power now, generated by overwhelming fear and the necessity for flight. She moved all three kids like rag dolls, toward the door. She opened it—and what last bit of reason she possessed failed her then, because there was an astronaut on the doorstep.

  His eyes looked out through a domed helmet. His body was enclosed in a spacesuit. She slammed the door in his face and ran through the house to the side door. It was already opening, and another astronaut was entering.

  Mary bolted for the window. A sheet of plastic came over it and she watched a man in a spacesuit taping it to the frame.

  Then, moments later, an enormous plastic envelope came down, enclosing the entire house.

  By nightfall the house had been converted into a gigantic, airtight package, draped in transparent vinyl, with huge air hoses climbing up over the roof and circling the structure. Bright lights, braced on tall scaffolding, illuminated it on all sides. The street was blocked off, and trailers and trucks were parked in the drive. Men came and went in blue jumpsuits.

  Entry to the house was through a van.

  Keys was in the van, just donning his jumpsuit and helmet. He opened the back door of the van and stepped into one of the enormous hoses. He walked along through it to a pneumatic seal; he unzipped it and entered the quarantined house.

  “. . . astounding . . . simply astounding . . .”

  The skeptical microbiologist was talking to himself inside his air helmet, his voice a strange wheezing, his face like a goldfish suffering shock in a dime-store bowl, as he stood dumbfounded in the area given over to his own team of specialists: men and women examining tissue slides and other samples from E.T.’s life-system, a system that had sent them all into momentary numbness, only some of which was wearing off now as they tried to cope with it.

  In another area of the house, a team of doctors was working with members of the family. A sample of Mary’s blood was being taken in a living room that had become an emergency ward.

  “Have any environmental changes occurred since the . . . it . . . has been sequestered in the house? Temperature, humidity, light intensity?”

  She stared at him, unable or unwilling to speak. Beside her, another doctor was taking Michael’s blood pressure.

  “Did you notice any superficial changes in the creature’s skin color or in his breathing? Any hair loss, any evidence of surface sweating?”

  “He never had any hair,” said Michael.

  “Apparently,” one doctor said to another, “the children were able to establish a primitive language system with the creature. Seven, eight monosyllabic words.”

  “I taught him to talk,” said Gertie to the doctor who was snipping a strand of her hair. A psychiatrist knelt before her.

  “You taught him to talk?”

  “With my Speak and Spell.”

  The psychiatrist had apparently never used one. “Have you seen your friend exhibit any emotions? Has he laughed or cried?”

  “He cried,” said Gertie. “He wanted to go home.”

  The leader of all this activity passed through, to the dining room, which was occupied by an X-ray team studying bone structures that had them scratching the sides of their helmets. Keys unzipped a plastic door and entered another room, where the quarantine had been most thoroughly imposed. The entire room was draped in plastic, and within it was still another room: a portable clean-room, ten feet by ten, plastic and transparent. Within it were Elliott and E.T., a team of medical specialists working around them.

  “I’m getting a reading now, not a human EKG pattern.”

  “Any Q-, R-, X-waves?”

  “No.”

  “Any waves at all?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  The reading the specialist was getting had never been covered in any of the manuals. But doctors are funny fellows; give them a few minutes with any outrage of life, and they’ll track it on their machinery, their calm somehow all-pervasive.

  “That’s odd . . .” was all one of them said, though it was exceedingly more than odd. Everything about the creature on the table before them was contradictory—parts of it like the quiet dreams of vegetables, and still other areas possessing the density of stone, low enough to paralyze the machines.

  “Sonar, have you got a location on the creature’s heart?”

  “Difficult to see.”

  “Well, does it have a heart?”

  “The entire screen is lit up. It looks like his whole chest is . . . a heart.”

  They poked him, prodded him, bent his limbs in all directions. Needles pricked his flesh in search of veins, other needles sought for reflexes. His ear-flaps were found, his delicate little ear-shoots opened. His universe-scanning eyes, supersensitive to light, were exposed to fierce, probing beams. The team worked feverishly, trying to unravel him from every possible angle at once, subjecting his tortured form to every possible scrutiny created by medicine to reveal the innermost workings of life.

  The doctor who led the team kept trying to wipe his own brow, only to find it encased in glass. He was frustrated, confused, had begun to look upon E.T. as a creature dragged from the bottom of the sea, a monster of unconsciousness, an inhuman form whose meaning, purpose, and secret would ultimately evade him.

  Awesome, yes, it was that, but its unspeakable ugliness robbed the doctor of his usual tenderness. His weary mind was seeing pterodactyls, primordial lizards, grotesqueries that should never have been and fortunately had ceased to be. This thing before him was one of them, cold and unfeeling, a creature out of one’s nightmares—the deformed monster that one always feared would emerge from the womb of life. It was natural to hate such an object and wish it dead.

  “It’s alive,” said the technician beside him, “but I can’t find the breath . . .”

  “. . . pulse remains steady . . .”

  The elderly voyager lay still, like a dead moon. The bright fluorescent lights beat down upon him, a hideous human glare, shining deep into his nerves. He saw that he’d fallen under their spell, these Earth doctors who worked equipment of the crudest sort, compared to the delicate scanners on the Great Ship.

  Ah, medicine, he sighed, calling to the Outer Night, where his own physicians were.

  “Body looks like a marfans type.”

  “Write down comparative exopthalmia.”

  “Foot reflex reveals bilateral babinskis.”

  “. . . I’m getting a breath. Just one . . .”

  He tried to feel his way toward the Ship, toward his higher purpose, for which he was much needed in the universe. Was he to lose all?

  Ah, E.T., he sighed to himself, they have got you now.

  The iron chains of Earth were on him. He was bound and shackled, and the weight was appalling, as his life-force continued its collapse.

  “Have we got any type of trace elements?”

  “We’ve established a radioactive threshold. But no evidence of superficial burning on the family, no bone damage.”

  “Doppler,
have you picked up any blood flow?”

  “I think we’re seeing some blood in the inguinal area.”

  “We’re picking up extra-systalyses—creature’s reading and simultaneous boy’s reading.”

  Again, the chief doctor nervously wiped his helmet. The boy and the monster were linked somehow, as if the monster were feeding on the child’s life. The child came in and out of consciousness, hallucinating, babbling, sinking under again. I’d cut the cord that ties them, thought the doctor, if I only knew where and what it was.

  He probed deeper, wiped his glass dome again. He was certain the creature was dying; his concern was now the boy. The heartbeat was irregular, the pulse weak, and all of it somehow synched with the monster, a hidden mesh that connected them in the most hellish way.

  Goddammit, thought the doctor, with a glance toward the outer rooms, hasn’t anyone figured this out yet?

  He saw the domed nodding heads, nodding over their machinery, and he knew that nobody had any answers for this one.

  He stared back down at the monstrous face. If ever there was an unfeeling, unrelated, cold, and loveless creature in the universe, it was this goddamn thing before him. Somehow it had evolved intelligence—for there’d been a spaceship—but the creatures who ran it were parasites, predators, incapable of sympathy, kindness, all the fine human things. He knew it as surely as he was standing here, and he wanted with all his heart to strangle the freak. It was dangerous; he could not say why, but his whole body knew it was dangerous to all of them.

  A needle punctured E.T.’s skin. On the table beside him, Elliott winced, as if the puncture had been into his own body. He turned toward the only familiar face, toward Keys. “You’re hurting him. You’re killing us . . .”

  Keys stared down at E.T. The vision he’d had of a noble space creature had altered radically in the face of E.T.’s ugliness; yet Keys’ mind still burned with higher mental waves. This thing on the table before him, ugly as it was, was from the Ship, and the Ship was infinite in its sweep and power. To serve it was Keys’ mission.

  “We’re trying to help him, Elliott. He needs attention.”

  “He wants to stay with me. He doesn’t know you.”

  “Elliott, your friend is a rare and valuable creature. We want to know him. If we can get to know him, we can learn so many things about the universe and about life. You saved him and were good to him. Can’t you let us do our part now?”

  “He wants to be with me.”

  “He will be. Wherever he goes, you’ll go. I promise you that.”

  But where the creature was going, none could follow. The whirling powers of his body were shifting at the core. The old being felt the enormity of this power, that of the ancient dragons. His race had harnessed this flame, this life. Was it to end in cataclysm? Was he to destroy this planet? No, he cried in himself, it must not come to that. What more horrible fate could there be than to destroy a thing so lovely as Earth? I would be cursed forever by the universe.

  But the dragon at his center was dancing, eyes bright as burning suns, flaming with mysteries of terror and conquest. A potent force would be released, blowing doctors, machines, friend and foe, all, everyone, through the roof of space.

  “The boy’s unconscious again.”

  “Call in the mother.”

  E.T. clung at the edge of the void, on a last thin thread of energy. A roaring filled his ears, and the mouth of the dragon was open below him; awesome, black tongues of cosmic fire licked upward, eager to consume a planet, a solar system, whatever might come its way. E.T. felt the envelope of his nature rupturing and star-knowledge funneling out, faster and faster.

  “I’m losing blood pressure.”

  “. . . and pulse . . .”

  “Increase oxygen.”

  “This wave just went into V-Tak!”

  “V-Tak or artifac? How can you tell with no Q, R, or X?”

  “He just went straight-line doc.”

  “Zap him!”

  An electrical device was applied to E.T.’s chest. They zapped him, injected adrenalin, pounded on him.

  “Nothing . . . I’m drawing a blank here . . .”

  The old space voyager’s EKG reading was a solid, steady line, heart action ceased. E.T. lay dead—but Elliott stirred, all of his strength returning almost at the moment the old voyager’s heart had ceased. E.T. had found at least one of the formulas he sought, that of a shield, cast behind him as he swooned into death, so the boy could not follow.

  Elliott jerked upright in bed, screaming, “E.T., don’t go!”

  “No response,” said a doctor. “No breath.”

  “He can hold his breath,” cried Elliott.

  The doctors shook their heads. The creature they’d tried to save was gone, and now their outraged sensibilities began to reel once more; what had it been they were working on?

  They hardly noticed the momentary flicker in the lights, and in the equipment, nor did they fully perceive the trembling of the house, the valley. This was reserved for other men, other equipment, those that monitor disturbances deep in the Earth’s core . . .

  Keys, like a child who cannot believe that death really exists, leaned in beside the extraterrestrial, and whispered, “How do we contact your people?”

  Elliott didn’t feel Mary’s hand on his shoulder, felt nothing but his loss. “He was—the best,” sobbed Elliott, eyes swimming with sorrow as he gazed at his ancient friend. Behind him, Gertie and Michael entered, over the protests of the chief doctor.

  Gertie went over to the table and stood on tiptoe, looking at the monster. “Is he dead, Mommy?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Can we wish for him to come back?”

  The last thing in life Mary would wish for was the little monster to come back. She gazed at his hideous shrunken form, his horrible mouth, his long creepy fingers and toes, his grotesque stomach—it was all ugliness, and it had nearly killed Elliott.

  “I wish,” said Gertie. “I wish, I wish, I wish . . .”

  I wish, thought Mary, repeating the child’s verse, for reasons she couldn’t sort out.

  The clean-room was cleared of everyone, including Elliott, who stood outside it now, staring in as E.T. was zipped into a plastic bag and covered with dry ice. Behind him, the other rooms were being stripped of their machinery and their protective vinyl coatings.

  A small lead coffin was brought, and taken into the clean-room. Agents placed the extraterrestrial in the box.

  Keys came behind Elliott and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Would you like to see him one last time?” Keys waved the other agents out and sent Elliott in alone, the plastic flap dropping closed behind him.

  Elliott stood over the little coffin. He brushed the dry ice away from E.T.’s face. The tears in Elliott’s eyes spilled down his cheeks and fell onto the plastic film covering E.T.’s wrinkled brow. “I thought I’d get to keep you forever. And I had a million things to show you, E.T. You were like a wish come true. But it wasn’t a wish I knew I had, till you came to me. Have you gone some place else now?”

  Do you believe in fairies?

  Geeple geeeple snnnnnnnnnnnn org

  A beam of golden light shot through inner space. Historians of the cosmos are divided as to the direction from which it came. It was more ancient than E.T., older than the oldest fossil. There are those who claim it was the healing soul of Earth itself, flickering a single thread of what it knew, as a gesture of diplomacy perhaps, toward its alien visitor.

  “Don’t peek in any more windows,” some say it said, and was gone.

  Others say the Earth was doomed and could not save itself, that the saving force had come from a sister planet, to lend a hand in pacifying the dragon of the nuclear force.

  And still others heard: dreeeple zoonnnnnnggggggg ummmmmtwrrrdssss

  Calling from the beyond.

  Whatever it was, it touched E.T.’s healing finger, and caused it to glow.

  He healed him
self.

  He did not know how.

  But he had a vision of his Captain, more beautiful than any could imagine.

  Good evening, Captain, said E.T.

  Don’t peek in windows, said the answering voice.

  Never again, my Captain.

  A brilliant glow filled E.T.’s entire body, and he felt golden all over, but especially in his heart-light, where the gold transmuted to red, on and off. The steam, rising from the dry ice, turned pinkish, tinted with color. Elliott noticed it, scraped away the ice from E.T.’s chest, and saw the glow of the old voyager’s heart-light.

  He turned toward the door, where Keys was still talking to Mary. He quickly covered E.T.’s heart-light with his hands.

  E.T.’s eyes opened. “E.T. phone home.”

  “Okay,” said Elliott in a joyful whisper. “Okay.” He removed his shirt and laid it over the heart-light. “We’ve got to sneak you out of here. Stay put . . .”

  Elliott laid the dry ice back in over E.T., and zipped the bag closed. Then, feigning grief, he went out through the flap, face in his hands, pushing past Mary and Keys. In another second he was in the kitchen alongside Michael and a table cluttered with surgical tools, face masks, and microscopes. On the table was E.T.’s wilted geranium. As Elliott whispered to Michael, the geranium, like Michael, lifted its head, and a moment later, fresh green leaves shot out of its dead stems. Buds appeared. It bloomed again.

  Michael made one quiet phone call and then slipped out the side door.

  Elliott was standing at the main air tube leading from the house as the agents came by, carrying the lead box. They opened the zipper door, the key-man holding it for them. They carried the coffin through the hose, deposited it in the van, and returned.

  “I’m going with E.T.,” said Elliott.

  “You and your family will go with me, Elliott. We’re all going to the same place.”

  “Where he goes, I go. You promised. I’m going with him now.”

  Keys sighed, pulled the zipper door back, and let Elliott through. Elliott scrambled up into the van, and knocked on the door to the cab. Michael, in the driver’s seat, turned. “Elliott, there’s just one thing. I’ve never driven forward before.”